The Phoronix Test Suite is the most comprehensive testing and bench-marking platform available for Linux and is designed to carry out qualitative and quantitative benchmarks in a clean, reproducible, and easy-to-use manner. This software is based upon the internal tools and extensive Linux benchmarking work done by Phoronix since 2004, with input from tier-one computer hardware vendors. This software is open-source and licensed under the GNU GPLv3 and consists of a lightweight core (pts-core) with each benchmark consisting of an XML-based profile with related utility scripts. The process from the benchmark installation, to the actual bench marking, to the parsing of important hardware and software components is heavily automated and completely repeatable, asking users only for confirmation of actions.

The Phoronix Test Suite can be used for simply comparing your computer's performance with your friends and co-workers or can also be used at your company for internal quality assurance purposes under Linux. Results from the Phoronix Test Suite are displayed in a results viewer with optional support for uploading them to PTS Global. PTS Global allows you to browse all uploaded results, search these results (coming soon), and comparing other results against your own system.

This benchmarking software with all benchmarking profiles can be found on the downloads page. The latest development code is housed at Phorogit, the public git repository hosted by Phoronix. All support inquiries and discussions can be directed to the Phoronix Test Suite Forum.

If you're interested in getting involved with the Phoronix Test Suite as either a developer or profile/suite maintainer for your favorite software package(s) (or other software that you develop), contact phoronix [at] phoronix.com as we do welcome user contributions.

You run Linux already but want to install 11.0? DVD image takes too long to download? Don’t want to waste a CD for the mini iso? A router connects you to the internet? Check out setupgrubfornfsinstall. It’s a dialog based shell script to prepare remote network installations. It was primarily made for use in LANs but now also supports direct installation from opensuse.org. Just run the script, select 11.0 and it will download the kernel and initrd used for installation. After that it adds an entry to your boot loaders’ config file with proper parameters. Reboot, select the new entry and the installation starts.

For openSUSE 11.0, Stefan Dirsch and the rest of the openSUSE Xorg team has worked hard to ensure that AIGLX is enabled by default for all supported hardware. This means that you can run Compiz or other desktop effects such as those in KDE 4 without having to directly enable Xgl or edit xorg.conf manually. Compiz Fusion project has matured significantly, complementing Compiz with extra plugins, a new settings configuration tool, and it is now installed by default on all openSUSE 11.0 installations.

Compiz Fusion comes with a simple settings manager (Simple CCSM) which also allows you to enable and disable Compiz in both KDE and GNOME. It can be found as the Desktop Effects application in the main menu. From here you can change general settings and not have to worry about the details. You can choose from a selection of pre-configured profiles: from anything such as minimal effects, to the full-blown “Hollywood’s got Nothing” profile, giving you countless of extra effects and plugins.

Compiz Fusion now also comes with an in-depth and highly configurable settings manager: CompizConfig Settings Manager (ccsm), which is also available by default in openSUSE 11.0. From here you can change a whole horde of settings so that Compiz behaves precisely as you want, or you can even choose to enable a large selection of extra plugins providing new eye-candy or helpful other additions. Be mindful about the performance impact that this might have on less powerful computers.

To find out how to use this and all other plugins, simply head over the Compiz Fusion Wiki at wiki.compiz-fusion.org. For trouble-shooting and general information about Compiz Fusion on openSUSE, see the Compiz Fusion wiki page.

Why? because most system administrator forget to change their default password in the system. So basically during the first assessment or audit, just go through using this default password to enter the system. What you need is to search this following site to get default password update.

Password Generic System
This following resources provide information about detail password in many type of system

Using Lynis : Basics
To run Lynis you should meet a few requirements:
- You have to be root (log in as normal user, su to root)
or have equivalent rights (for example by using sudo).
- Have write access to /var/log (for using a log/debug and report file)
- Have write access to /tmp (temporary files)

Depending on the installation or the path you run Lynis from, you can start it with 'lynis' (if installed and the file is available in your binary path) or 'sh lynis' or './lynis'.

The report can include a detailed security audit of the device settings or be a configuration report, the output is customisable. Nipper supports a wide variety of devices from different manufacturers such as Cisco, Nokia, Juniper, CheckPoint and Nortel.

Installation:
If you have GNU make, then you can make use of the Makefile provided with Nipper. The procedure is as follows:

1. Download the latest Nipper source code - here.
2. Extract the source code.
3. Change directory to the source code directory.
4. Run make
5. As a privileged user, run make install

Device Support
Nipper supports a variety of different types of device from different manufacturers. With each new version of Nipper, this support is enhanced, expanded and more device types added. The current version of Nipper supports the following different types of device:

The previous post explained how computers boot up right up to the point where the boot loader, after stuffing the kernel image into memory, is about to jump into the kernel entry point. This last post about booting takes a look at the guts of the kernel to see how an operating system starts life. Since I have an empirical bent I’ll link heavily to the sources for Linux kernel 2.6.25.6 at the Linux Cross Reference. The sources are very readable if you are familiar with C-like syntax; even if you miss some details you can get the gist of what’s happening. The main obstacle is the lack of context around some of the code, such as when or why it runs or the underlying features of the machine. I hope to provide a bit of that context. Due to brevity (hah!) a lot of fun stuff - like interrupts and memory - gets only a nod for now. The post ends with the highlights for the Windows boot.

At this point in the Intel x86 boot story the processor is running in real-mode, is able to address 1 MB of memory, and RAM looks like this for a modern Linux system:

RAM contents after boot loader is done

The kernel image has been loaded to memory by the boot loader using the BIOS disk I/O services. This image is an exact copy of the file in your hard drive that contains the kernel, e.g. /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-server. The image is split into two pieces: a small part containing the real-mode kernel code is loaded below the 640K barrier; the bulk of the kernel, which runs in protected mode, is loaded after the first megabyte of memory.

IEs4Linux is the simpler way to have Microsoft Internet Explorer running on Linux (or any OS running Wine). WINE is a opensource Windows API implementation for the Linux platform and IEs4Linux is the “installer” which will download, install and get IE to work with WINE.

This media player uses the open source MPlayer engine and is built on Java, which means you can run it on pretty much any devices that supports Java. There's also a Windows installer which makes running aTunes on Windows.

There is an iptables module named OSF (passive OS Fingerprinting) that was written by Evgeniy Polyakov. This module allows passively detect OS packet was sent from and perform various netfilter actions based on this match. Packets with SYN bit set are analyzed.

2. Edit Makefile from unpacked archive in order to set proper path to iptables headers (iptables.h and libiptc/ dir).

3. If your kernel sources can not be accessed via /lib/modules/$(shell uname -r)/build, you have to replace KDIR variable with the correct path to kernel sources.
4. Run make that should build ipt_osf.ko kernel module.
5. Run make lib that will build libipt_osf.so shared library (copy it to where all other iptables shared libs are placed in your distro e.g. /lib/iptables or /lib64/iptables in Fedora).

6. Run make bin that will build userspace applications which allows to load fingerprints and obtain information about matched packets (load, osfd, ucon_osf).

* --log
If present, OSF will log determined genres even if they don't match desired one.
0 - log all matched and unknown entries.
1 - only first one.
2 - log all matched entries.
* --ttl
0 - true ip and fingerprint TTL comparison. Works for LAN.
1 - check if ip TTL is less than fingerprint one. Works for global addresses.
2 - do not compare TTL at all. Allows to detect NMAP, but can produce false results.
* --connector
If present, OSF will log all events also through netlink connector(1.0 id).
More about connector can be found in Documentation/connector in kernel source tree.

Suppose you have a domain (test.com) on which your sendmail is running and you want to send out the mails from this server with domain (other.com) — (This is a very simple example to doing spamming)

In such a scenario, sendmail can be configured to masquerade the domain name (From test.com to other.com), effectively.

Before changing the default sendmail configuration, the Sendmail Configuration Files and the M4 macro processor must be installed. M4 reads the sendmail.mc file and produces the sendmail.cf configuration file read by the sendmail application.

Next, we need to modify the sendmail.mc file, located in /etc/mail. We’re mainly concerned with the MASQUERADE_AS, masquerade_envelope and masquerade_entire_domain lines. These lines will be prefixed with delete through newline (dnl) statements. Delete dnl from the beginning of

If you want to do a simple and quick network performance test you can use the ftp command.

FTP on Linux and other Unix systems allows you to pass shell commands to the ftp client by using the pipe symbol ‘|’ as the first character of the file name. With this feature you can send a very large file to a remote host using /dev/zero as input and /dev/null as output.

Example:

ftp> put “|dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=100″ /dev/null

This command transfers a large file without involving the disk and without having to cache the file in memory. If you use a large file on a disk it might become a bottleneck. In this example, “|dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=100″ becomes the input file. Since a dd command without the “of=” paramater prints the content of the file to standard output (stdout), the ftp client can read the output and pass it on to the remote file which is /dev/null on the remote host.

On openSUSE 11.0 it is no longer possible to enable or disable Xgl with a graphical tool (such as gnome-xgl-settings in the past). Only the command line tool xgl-switch is still left to do this job. Instead AIGLX is now always enabled on supported hardware. There are still some issues with AIGLX (e.g., Xvideo is usually slower, OpenGL applications are misplaced when you rotate compiz' cube), but the majority of our customers are requesting to have AIGLX enabled by default. If you prefer Xgl over AIGLX use the command line tool xgl-switch to enable it:

xgl-switch --enable-xgl

If there are problems after enabling it (Xserver crashes, etc.) disable it again by running

xgl-switch --disable-xgl

The proprietary NVIDIA driver needs neither AIGLX nor Xgl for running with compositing managers as it provides its own framework. To enable Compiz, use "Desktop Effects (simple-ccsm)" application from the application menu.

Inode Size on the Ext3 Filesystem Increased

The inode size on the ext3 filesystem is increased from 128 to 256 by default. This change breaks many existing ext3 tools such as the windows tool EXTFS. If you depend on such tools, install openSUSE with the old value.

Press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace Twice to Terminate the X Server

Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Backspace on GNOME, KDE, or any other graphical desktop does not terminate the X server any longer. If you press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace within 2 seconds again, it terminates the X server. On most hardware you hear a beep after the first Ctrl-Alt-Backspace press.

Errors are a common symptom of slow connectivity due to poor configuration or excessive bandwidth utilization. They should always be corrected whenever possible. Error rates in excess of 0.5% can result in noticeable sluggishness.

4) Edit squid.conf; specifically, you need to define the authentication program in squid.conf, which is in this case ncsa_auth. Next, create an ACL named ncsa_users with the REQUIRED keyword that forces Squid to use the NCSA auth_param method you defined previously. Finally, create an http_access entry that allows traffic that matches the ncsa_users ACL entry. Here’s a simple user authentication example; the order of the statements is important:

We hear that openSUSE 11.0 is just about to come out in some hours time, and it's high time to consider to go from a .2/.3 release to a .0 release? Well here are some main reasons why:

QT4 Installer:
Obviously the first thing you see when you upgrade / install an operating system is the installer screen. openSUSE 11.0 introduces a beautifully designed new QT 4 installer, that runs circles around any current Windows / Linux or Mac OX Installer (in terms of looks).

Package Management (Zypper):
Zypper has gone through MANY changes since it’s time in openSUSE 10.3. Currently 11.0 is running zypper 0.11.6-4.1, and package management is done so much smarter and faster (installing application, updating repo’s everything is much faster on openSUSE 11.0 then it was in previous versions).

Xorg:
Xorg has been updated to 7.3 (upgraded from 7.2 in openSUSE 10.3) and has many updates to Intel / Nvidia based xorg drivers. (if running Nvidia / ATI I recommend installing ATI / Nvidia proprietary drivers). Also note that AIGLX is enabled by default now.

Kernel:
openSUSE 11.0 ships with the pae kernel by default and is version 2.6.25 which has seen many improvements in virtualization, scheduling and obviously hardware support since 10.3’s release with 2.6.22.

KDE 3.5.9:
Has many improvements from KDE 3.5.7 which shipped with openSUSE 10.3. Many enhancements were done to PIM (Personal Identification Manager, ie Kmail, Kontact etc) along with many bugfixes since then.

KDE 4:
Although KDE 4.1 wasn’t released in time for openSUSE 11.0 you can upgrade to it using one of the openSUSE Build Services. With that said, openSUSE 11.0 ships with KDE 4.0.4 and will stay with that line for the life of the product. I honestly think it is on its way to being a very kick ass Desktop Environment, BUT, I just cannot afford to use it as my default DE on my production machines, since there are still some issues (mostly in plasma).

There are tons of other reasons and updates that have been done, that I haven’t captured in this quick blog. This is just to help steer the people on the grasps of “Should I upgrade or not” to just go ahead and do it. Many of the other notable updates are:

NetworkManager (although it still has a few issues with communication with YaST configurations)
OpenOffice (2.4.1).
Wine (1.0 rc by default but with the release of 1.0 today, I expect it to make the update repo).
Amarok (1.4.9.1)

Enter keystore password:What is your first and last name? [Unknown]: NikeshWhat is the name of your organizational unit? [Unknown]: CybageWhat is the name of your organization? [Unknown]: CybageWhat is the name of your City or Locality? [Unknown]: PuneWhat is the name of your State or Province? [Unknown]: MHWhat is the two-letter country code for this unit? [Unknown]: INIs CN=Nikesh, OU=Cybage, O=Cybage, L=Pune, ST=MH, C=IN correct? [no]: yes

(wait...)

Enter key password for (RETURN if same as keystore password):Re-enter new password:

(press [enter])

4. Export key: keytool -export -alias key -file cert.crt

Enter keystore password: *******Certificate stored in file cert.crt

5. Create JAR: jar cvf applet.jar main.classAdd all classes used in your project by typing the classnames in the same line.

The cache manager (cachemgr.cgi) is a CGI utility comes with squid for displaying statistics about the squid process as it runs. The cache manager is a convenient way to manage the cache and view statistics without logging into the server

To make this configuration you need a webserver (Apache) running and configured.

1) Try to locate your cachemgr.cgi file which comes with the squid package, this can be done using rpm -ql command (different distro stores this file at different location), here you can also use locate/find command.

By default there are lot of services that are running on your system (Any Fedora system) and all these services consume your resource like CPU and Memory, increase your booting time and also open your system for attack, So in order to make your system run faster and safer we need to stop all these unwanted services.

Login with root account, go to console and fire command “ntsysv”, you should see something similar to this…Now stop all the unwanted services and restart your box, you should see some decrease in your booting time.

Note: If your not aware of what all these services means, please do some google or use command “system-config-services” which provides a good looking GUI interface and also provide some short description about all these services.

For suse use - They can use "yast2" to lookup the services.

2) Need to get more out of your linuxAs per man pages of “mount” command, we have some good option to speed up the access of files from your HDD … “noatime option do not update inode access times on file system (e.g, for faster access on the news spool to speed up news servers)”So if we update the our fstab file and mount our root partition (/) with “noatime” will surely increase the speed of our box, (This is how you can do this - have similar entry for your “/” partition in your fstab file)

Each IP packet has a Time to Live (TTL) section that keeps track of the number of network devices the packet has passed through to reach its destination. The server sending the packet sets the initial TTL value, and each network device that the packet passes through then reduces this value by 1. If the TTL value reaches 0, the next network device will discard the packet.

This mechanism helps to ensure that bad routing on the Internet won’t cause packets to aimlessly loop around the network without being removed. TTLs therefore help to reduce the clogging of data circuits with unnecessary traffic.

The moment you press Enter the prompt changes into an arrow indicating that more information is required by Linux. Type the following command assuming you have installed XMMS player which plays mp3 files and that you actually have a mp3 file in the directory shown below

> xmms /home/david/mp3s/rock_my_world.mp3

Once you have typed the above press and then finally press -D

Thats it. Now Linux will make the XMMS player to play the particular mp3 file at the time 23:59. Thats just a minute before midnight. Linux surely rocks your world !! ;-)

Basically if you are using the 24 hour clock then you enter the time you want with the hours and the minutes together one after another. Hours = 0-23 & Minutes = 0-59. Then type the exact command that you would have typed had you wanted to execute the task manually. If you want you can issue more commands after the first one. Once you finish entering all the tasks press -D to indicate that you have finished. Then wait and enjoy.. Linux will do the rest.

Computer Temperature Monitor is a little applet for the GNOME desktop that shows the temperature of your computer CPU and disks on screen. It allows you to log temperatures to a file. You can set alarms to notify you when a tempertature is reached.

Approaches to authentication such username and password is done only once, at the point that the user logs into the system. An alternative to this approach is provided by the Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol (CHAP) which repeats an authentication procedure at random intervals during an ongoing connection between a client and a service.

The CHAP authentication scheme is used primarily by Point to Point Protocol (PPP) servers as a way to validate the identity of remote clients (perhaps most commonly used by internet service providers). At random time intervals, CHAP verifies the identity of the client by using something known as a three-way handshake. This verification is performed using a credential which is known to both the client and the service (typically the user's password).

After the link between the client and the server (also known as the authenticator) has been established it sends a challenge message to the peer. The peer subsequently responds to the authenticator with a hashed value calculated using the Message Digest (MD5) hashing algorithm. The authenticator checks the client response against its own calculation of the expected hash value. If the two values match, the authenticator acknowledges the authentication. If the values do not match, the connect is terminated. These steps are repeated at random intervals.

It is important to note that Microsoft has also implemented two variants of the Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol, called MS-CHAP and MS-CHAP-v2.

IBM announced the completion of a one-petaflop supercomputer that runs Red Hat Linux. Twice as fast as the previous record-setter, the IBM Blue Gene, the Roadrunner uses a hybrid design that combines 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips with 12,960 Cell processor engines.

The Roadrunner was built for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration and will be soon be shipped to its new home at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. There, it will be put to work monitoring the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, but will also be available for research into astronomy, energy, human genome science, and climate change, says IBM.

There's a utility called Alien that converts packages from one format to the other. This doesn't always mean that an rpm will work on your system, though. You will need to install some prerequisite software packages in order to install alien

Run this command to install alien and other necessary packages:

sudo apt-get install alien dpkg-dev debhelper build-essential

To convert a package from rpm to debian format, use this command syntax. The sudo may not be necessary, but we'll include it just in case.

sudo alien packagename.rpm

To install the package, you'll use the dpkg utility, which is the internal package management tool behind debian and Ubuntu.

sudo dpkg -i packagename.deb

The package should now be installed, providing it's compatible with your system.

2) Open a Terminal and type in the following commands, note that hd0,0 implies the first hard drive and the first partition on that drive, which is where you probably installed grub to during installation. If not, then adjust accordingly.

Download the DVD ISO :
Get the Fedora Core DVD iso from http://fedoraproject.org/en/get-fedora and save the disk image to a partition on your hard drive that will not be formatted during the installation.

If you have a FAT32 partition that you use to share data with Windows on a dual boot system like mine then this is an ideal place. Otherwise any Linux partition (ext2, ext3) will do as long as it can be read by the installation program (for this reason an NTFS formatted windows partition will not work).

Also make sure that the partition is large enough to hold the file as the Fedora DVD weights in around 3+ Gb.

Mount the downloaded iso file
Next we need to mount the iso so we can read the contents, open a terminal and as root run the following command. The iso can be mounted anywhere but in my case I'll create a folder in my home directory and mount it there.

Replace /mnt/fat/dualboot/F-9-i386-DVD.iso with the location of your saved DVD iso file and FedoraInstall with your desired mount point. Now you should be able to browse the contents of the install iso from the command line or Nautilus.

Copy the boot files
Next go into the newly created mounted files and find the directory called isolinux, From the command line do the following.

Copy the files called initrd.img and vmlinuz to your /boot directory (you will need to be root to write files to the boot directory)

$ cp initrd.img vmlinuz /boot/

If you wish to rename these files to make them easier to identify in the future that's OK as long as you know what they are called for the next step. I'll rename them with the name -installFC8, again root login is required.

Edit your grub.conf
Finally we need to add an entry to our grub.conf file to give us the option of booting into the installer and to tell grub where to find the boot files we just copied. Open the file /etc/grub.conf with a text editor (as root) and add the following lines.

The title is up to you but be sure to replace the root (hd0,2) with the correct information from your system. The easiest way is just to copy the entry from your other grub entries. In my case I also have:

So just use the value from your other boot target. Also if you renamed the initrd.img and vmlinuz files use the names that apply to you. Save and close the file.

Reboot into the installer.
Next reboot your computer and from the list of boot targets select the 'Fedora 9 install' entry. The installer will then run presenting you with a screen first asking for your language and keyboard layout.

The next screen asks for the install source, select 'Hard Drive' from the list. From the screen shown below select the partition on your hard drive that contains the Fedora iso you downloaded along with the directory containing the image (as instructed you can press F2 here to
browse for the iso file).

Web 2.0 applications and sites place the focus firmly on browser performance. Anyone who still believes that the speed of your DSL connection is the only potential bottleneck is gravely mistaken. Key parts of Ajax applications run locally, which means that — all other things being equal — the speed of the browser will be crucial in determining the user experience. For Ajax-based business applications, the browser becomes even more important because data will be accessed from within-firewall servers rather than the internet. Companies deploying such solutions will be able to improve employee productivity by paying attention to browser performance.

...in the past three years, a few distributions have made stupendous leaps in performance and usability, winning the affection of millions of mainstream desktop users.

The recent releases of Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9 — two top Linux distributions — mark another step forward in the evolution of the Linux desktop. I've been running both of them to see which offers the better blend of usability and advanced features.

What is DDos attack:On the Internet, a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one in which a multitude of compromised systems attack a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system. The flood of incoming messages to the target system essentially forces it to shut down, thereby denying service to the system to legitimate users.

When you run this Perl script, it will then run an netstat command check how many times each IP is connected and if there are more then the number of connections you specified then it will automatically run a command in APF for the IP to be banned.

In this short post I will show you how you can quickly add a range of IPs on any RedHat based system (Rhel, Centos, Fedora, etc). When you have to add many IPs to a system this can be quite handy and save a lot of time.

Normally when you add a new IP to a network interface in a RedHat based system you create a file ifcfg-eth0:x in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/. For example:

Similar to the above example you can create several aliases. But what if you have to add a lot of IPs that are in a range like this? Let’s say that I want to add 100 IPs this way… this is possible, but not very effective, right? RedHat based systems offer a method to bind a range of IPs in a quick way allowing us to eliminate the need to create a lot of files and saving us time doing this.

Create a file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0-range0 if this doesn’t exist, or just add to it if you already have it, the following lines: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0-range0

IPADDR_START=192.168.0.100IPADDR_END=192.168.0.200CLONENUM_START=0

where: IPADDR_START is the first IP and IPADDR_END is the last IP in the range. CLONENUM_START is the number that will be assigned to the first IP alias interface (eth0:0 in this example).

If you need to add more ranges of IPs then just use a different file for ex. ifcfg-eth0-range1, for each one of the ranges. You need to be careful and use the proper CLONENUM_START to not overwrite other aliases. Once you have configured the range/s of IPs you just need to restart the network service in order to activate it:

PHP is a general-purpose scripting language suited for Web development. The PHP script can be embedded into HTML. This section explains how to install and configure PHP5 in Ubuntu System

Installation

To install PHP5 you can enter the following command in the terminal prompt:

sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5

You can run PHP5 scripts from command line. To run PHP5 scripts from command line you should install php5-cli package. To install php5-cli you can enter the following command in the terminal prompt:

sudo apt-get install php5-cli

You can also execute PHP5 scripts without installing PHP5 Apache module. To accomplish this, you should install php5-cgi package. You can run the following command in a terminal prompt to install php5-cgi package:

sudo apt-get install php5-cgi

To use MySQL with PHP5 you should install php5-mysql package. To install php5-mysql you can enter the following command in the terminal prompt:

We all know that CDs don't live forever. Often loss of data is predictable when the disc is starts to take longer to read, but these changes in speed are often enough too small to be noticed or something else (like the overall system load) is taken responsible for it.

Therefor it is good to have a little tool that analyzes your discs properly so that you can make a backup in time. Such a tool is cdck. It's just a small command-line program, but as many Unix-tools it is a specialized tool which does it's job right.

It reads the disc block by block and measures the time it takes to read each block. Based on these statistics you get a summary about the current quality of your CD or DVD. If you like you can even output a graph which can then be displayed in GNUPlot.

Google Gadgets for Linux provides a platform for running desktop gadgets under Linux, catering to the unique needs of Linux users, this project is open-sourced, under the Apache License.

The Windows and Mac versions of Google Desktop has provided gadget hosting functionality on Windows and Mac for a while now and the Linux version of Google Gadgets will extend this platform to Linux users. By enabling cross-platform gadgets, a large library of existing gadgets are immediately available to Linux users. In addition, gadget developers will benefit from a much larger potential user base without having to learn a new API.

There's two main components to the application: one is a common gadget library responsible for running and presenting a gadget, and the other is a host program that allows the user to choose gadgets and run them on the desktop. Currently they have hosts written for GTK+ and QT, with the GTK+ host offering a sidebar similiar to that of Google Desktop for Windows.

WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFMPEG. It will convert most any video file that FFmpeg will convert. WinFF does multiple files in multiple formats at one time. You can for example convert mpeg's, flv's, and mov's, all into avi's all at once. WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, VISTA, and Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat based GNU/Linux distributions.

SmoothWall Express is an open source firewall distribution based on the GNU/Linux operating system. Linux is the ideal choice for security systems; it is well proven, secure, highly configurable and freely available as open source code. SmoothWall includes a hardened subset of the GNU/Linux operating system, so there is no separate OS to install. Designed for ease of use, SmoothWall is configured via a web-based GUI, and requires absolutely no knowledge of Linux to install or use.

SmoothWall Express turns a PC into a dedicated hardware firewall, which sits between your private network and the Internet. It does not allow any unauthorised data to pass through the firewall. There are no services offered to the Internet and SmoothWall Express will not respond to the network messages that hackers use to identify potential targets. It is therefore quite simply invisible to the legions of script kiddies, hackers and crackers looking for an interesting firewall to attack.